Reaction speed.

There is a buzz around the internet about high reaction speed being related to IQ. The swifter one's reactions are, the higher the IQ is supposed to be. This is of interest to me, because I have super fast reactions.

For example, driving with my wife, at night, on an island loaded with deer, one must often take evasive action with almost no advance notice. Before my wife has even registered anything deer-shaped, I am on the brakes, and the car safely stopped, or almost stopped. This amazes her, but is inconsequential to me. I expect deer, and prepare, accordingly.

Some years ago, I was working at a Club Med, in Mexico, and one of the inane pastimes employed by the staff to entertain the guests, went like this... Suspend a twelve-inch ruler, at chest-height, between thumb and index finger, by its twelve-end, with the one-end facing the floor. Have the guest prepare to catch the ruler by placing their open thumb and index finger at the one-mark. Randomly drop the ruler, with no warning. Observe how glacially slow peoples' reaction times are.

Most would fail to catch the ruler at all, while a few managed to grasp it at about ten or eleven inches. I could routinely grab it at one inch, or - at most - two.

You might try this, yourself, if you can come up with another willing body. It is illuminating. But here's a tip that will certainly help: You'll do much better if you can completely relax. And this, I imagine, also enhances intellect. Neither preempt, nor stress-out. Zero to sixty, outside of time

I used to play competitive smash bros melee when I was younger, and if you'll all stifle your laughter for just a moment, you'll notice that, if nothing else, it requires pretty exemplary reaction speed.

After a small bit of searching, I found an old guide I once used in an attempt to better myself. An excerpt:

"Pure Reaction Time (PuRe Time): This is how long it takes for you to react to something when your mind is clear. You wait for an action, you figure out what it is, and you respond. PuRe time for most people is pretty strong, surprisingly, provided you know how to respond to different situations (see tactics, below).

Amplified Reaction Time (ART): Your ART is how quickly you react to something that you expect. When you know something is going to happen, you have your course of action planned out ahead of time, and then what you expect happens. Your ART is much better than your PuRe Time, although just how much varies from person to person.

Diminished Reaction Time (DiRT): DiRT is how long it takes to react to something you didn't expect. When you think the opponent is going to act in one way and he acts in another, there is extra lag time in your mind while you re-adjust. In fact, sometimes you think "he's doing this, not that!" and you do your pre-planned response anyhow, or you adjust and mistime your new response."

Your deer-avoidance skills seem to have a lot in common with what the author labelled Amplified Reaction Time. Maybe you should pick up Melee sometime?

Not my kind of video game. The only one I play is Skyrim, as an archer. I just moved my real-world archery target out into the woods. Straw bales make a good arrow trap. Time to build up winter-softened muscles again, with my toy recurve, before wrestling with the longbow.

Reaction time and IQ has a correlation, but that is about it. There is nothing yet about any substantial relation. Intuitively, it doesnt make much sense, professional athletes (who would be selected for low reaction times in certain sports) arent exactly known for their smarts. Bruce Charlton has a real hard on for it, but for the sake of showing that diminished reaction times since the victorian era are proof of dysgenic, intelligence reducing behaviour in western nations. I dont buy that either, but it isnt totally incredible. This is an area that requires a lot more high quality research.

It isnt possible to catch the ruler at the one mark as pure reaction in your story crow. We did the same thing in school in science class, its a good test but electronic ones are far superior.

Really? My point was that I have unreasonably fast reaction times. My affinity for crows includes their mystical ability to move outside of time. Which is something I seem able to do, sometimes when least expected. Teleportation is one way of looking at it, although that really isn't what it is. Stop time. Step off. Move. Step back on. Restart time... Mystery

The time for an object to fall .0254 meters (one inch) is .07 seconds.

Signals commanding conscious action travel at 20 m/s.

This means that, ignoring the time for the light waves to travel from the ruler to Crow's eyes, provided that the distance from his eyes to the tip of his fingers is less than 1.4 meters, he's within nerve transmission speed.

Without predicting when the ruler will drop, one inch is still clearly bullshit. World-class sprinters have a reaction time of over 0.15 seconds (Usain Bolt's world-record reaction time off the blocks was 0.165 seconds); in that time, the ruler would fall 0.1334025 meters (5.3 inches).

How easy to label as bullshit what you do not understand. Because you can not duplicate it, does not mean it can not be done. Consider prescience as a factor. Did I know the exact instant the ruler would be released? Did I begin my reaction ahead of the event? I have enough instances of absurdly immediate reactions to suggest this.

Since we don't know what it is or how it works, it isn't purely anything. And it really doesn't matter, does it? What matters is that it can be done. And that's uber, is it not? You uber-guys might take note of stuff like this: it requires a mindset that doesn't rely on the mind. It is without limits. Like you, if you let yourself be.

Without even considering possible mystical factors, which I would not discount since I do not believe that time is as absolute as many people believe it to be. There are numerous factors which could render Crow's story possible. For example, it is more than likely that the person dropping the ruler signals their intentions in some way that can be picked up on intuitively by certain people. It should be obvious that there are more variables at work than pure reaction time alone.